Notebooks¶
First, context. Skip to the next section for the important bit.
For a long time, I didn’t really take notes. Sure, I did take notes in college and I guess they were useful sometimes, but the purpose was more to help me learn things than as a reference to revisit in the future. Writing helps solidify knowledge, and that was usually enough to get me through classes.
Last year, my job changed a bit in character and I started having a lot more meetings. These were not all the useless kind of meeting where someone talks about something that has nothing to do with my job for an hour. A significant number of these meetings were about collecting lists of things that I had to then make sure got done. Of course, I’ve been in meetings where I’m given stuff to do before, but usually I’d go to my desk after the meeting and either open a ticket or just do the thing. These are mostly trivial tasks like writing an e-mail for 10 minutes, or telling someone about something I learned in the meeting that matters to them.
However, now some days are packed with wall-to-wall meetings. There’s a bunch of blue in my calendar, and it doesn’t give me any time to send that e-mail. My brain was not up to the task of remembering to do all the things from the meeting 4 hours ago, particularly after sitting through 4 hours of meetings.
So, of course, the solution was to write down what I had to do. I settled on a very simple format, and it’s served me well. Here it is, in case it’s not obvious enough for everyone else to come up with independently:
Format¶
If any of the notes come with to-do items, I draw a box. When the item is done, I check off the box.
How to Use It¶
Whenever I’m sitting at my desk wondering what I should do next, one of the things I do is go through the last few days of my notebook and make sure all the boxes are checked. It works pretty well. I also refer to the notes occasionally, but the check boxes stand out pretty clearly.
This is for anything that might qualify as a meeting. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” I draw a line in the notebook, write the date, and the person’s name. If it turns out to be nothing for me to do, maybe I’ll summarize what we talked about. Maybe I’ll leave it empty. Paper is pretty cheap these days, and I’ve only wasted 2 lines.
I keep a separate notebook for working out problems. Sometimes I need scratch paper, and I don’t want to pollute my meeting notes with that. That’s it. Now you can be as organized as I am. Never forgetting to do something that needs doing, even if you don’t get to it for 2 days.